Man for all Seasons David Cameron consolidated his lead in the human cliché stakes today be remarking that”we’re all Thatcherites now”. Some of us never were, Mr Cameron – a reality one might have thought obvious by the divisive mud-slinging no-holds-barred battle between the Deists and the Demonisers since her merciful release of last week. The reality of this shallow man’s occupation of Ten Downing Street is something I remain unable to grasp, but then I felt precisely the same way about Tony Blair.

Our Prime Minister’s one attempt at stamping his mark upon the UK over the last three years was The Big Society, a concept so dense whole armies of amateur cod philosophers have been first lost and then asphyxiated in it. The situation has recently been exacerbated by the fact that not only does nobody know what it is, what Britain has become bears no relation even to what they thought it might be. Did anyone nine months ago, for example, think a crooked media mogul, three crooked bank CEOs, and a crooked monopoly supplier to government would be not only outside jail, but also thriving in public life? Well yes, we probably did: but we were sort of hoping it wasn’t what The Big Society is about.

Where I am now is a relatively small society on the verge of not being a society any more. It’s already one where beggars hassle the visitor every hour or so, middle class people can’t pay electricity or phone bills, most car traffic has disappeared, the retail trade is on its arse, and foreign financial despots are demanding more and more firstborn flesh. I was explaining my view about the country’s position in the greater scheme of things to a native yesterday, but for inhabitants here the shock of the burglary is still the overwhelming emotion – that and the absence of any discernible police force to punish the perpetrators.

For those of us observers lucky enough not to be acting out this local tragedy, there seems little doubt that the acceleration period of financial inundation is now well under way…and on the way to being out of control. The Any Old Iron Lady is on her way out just too soon to see the maiden voyage of SS Globecantile hit the iceberg while steaming at 45 knots towards the New Horizon.

On top of her obvious economic and export slowdown, China is slowly beginning to admit that she has a banking bubble big enough to make Lehman seem a silent fart by comparison. A senior Chinese auditor has warned that local government debt is “out of control” and could spark a bigger financial crisis than the US housing market crash. One senior player in the sector Zhang Ke said he would no longer buy local government bonds, these by now having a status rather worse than Cyprus but slightly better than Zimbabwe.

Yesterday, aptly-named Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, whose municipality has the lowest credit rating of the five most-populous U.S. cities, invited bankers and other concerned folks to his office for a private meeting that is a virtual public recognition of the City’s bankruptcy. And in California, those once loopy-spaced but now stick-thin Perrier drinking taxpayers face a 50% hike in the cost of funding that which is not currently funded as such for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. It’s just a gnats’ short of full by $87 billion in unfunded obligations.

This is where low-tax, high-leverage, financial paper neocon paradigms end up – and as if those fantasies weren’t enough, the globalist mercantile trade joke overlaid upon it by Thoedore F**kwitt forty years ago is about to make currency trench-warfare the new bailout slaughter. Having crashed down to $1340 over the lst four days, the shiny gold-haven is today skiing crazily over a giant mowgli field: down $6, up $13, down $13, up $13 in the last in the last seven hours alone.

It’s highly possible that while at first Beijing has been happy – along with the other central banks – to gobble up the manipulated metal at a knockdown price, there are now fears inside the Big C that this could turn into just another way for the US to block off a genuinely alternative investment route for them. Put another way, “Don’t try and move out of our debt pile slant-eyes, or we’ll render your gold worthless”. Oddly enough, in the last hour I got this from a Slogger along similar lines:

‘An angle not covered in the gold price fall is the possibility of a power play between China and the US. The Chinese were keen to divert out of the manipulated US Treasury market into gold. Now the Fed is showing that they can manipulate gold too! The message the US is presumably trying to send is that the Chinese are cornered when it comes to investing the proceeds of their trade surplus with the US.’

So what we see now is Washington sells some, Beijing buys more….just as with Swiss Francs v Euros six weeks ago, and Yuan v Yen three weeks ago. It’s the World Series, folks: the knockout tournament in which everyone dies.

If you sit in the lunatic fringe making sense for long enough, there’s no need to desert the fringe, because the mainstream will come to you. After the first post about Gold hokum in 2005 by The Slog’s predecessor nby, the ten-day stream of hooting emailed laughter that followed was audible from New York to Sydney. So there you have it: proof positive that time wounds all heels.

‘the Fed can manipulate gold too’
err, don’t think so. The Fed and their friends can crash the price of pieces of paper that claim to have some notional relationship with the shiny metal, and with their colour copiers, they can run off hundreds of duplicates and sell them too. But they don’t own the stuff.

In the meantime, (if they can find any) real people can buy real gold at a bargain price. There is a disconnect between the paper markets and the physical markets, and it is a suicide action by the central banks that is going on now. One can only presume they are also buying physical metal under the table as fast as they can, because certainly the Asians and Russians are.
(and so should all of us). If they are not, they will kill all the commodities futures markets -not a bad thing in itself, for anything that destroys speculators who never hold the goods, is a good thing in my book.

In fairness, everyone knows that the paper gold market is utterly manipulated by wall st thugs. If I know this, then the PBOC knows this. Yet they continue to stack.

What’s happening to gold is nothing short of a fundamental disconnect between paper promises and the real thing. Try getting physical at these spot prices. And the funny part is that its becoming a mythical “double giffen good”. As it drops, everyone bails in because its on sale. When it goes up they bail in because they see some yield. India, China and Russia are playing a blinder, Bernanke and chums are desperate. Their attack on gold is just a delay and pray strategy designed to hold back the loss of faith in the dollar.

KFC: china saw a sale on and did nothing to damage that. More time to stack more metal at suppressed prices. The second they want to make gold into a tier 1 ultra asset they will. All they’ll have to do is publically update their official holdings. Circa 5000+ tonnes.

Chinese markets have take up nearly 800 tonnes of physical since the beginning of the year. Huge outflows of physical from COMEX warehouses and LBMA vaults over the past 90 days. The investment banks dumped nearly a years supply of paper shorts in two days on to the market (I wonder why) but certain central banks brought 145 tonnes of physical. I bet those LBMA vaults are like the bullion dealers at the moment. A little low on stock, to say the least.

A sad reflection on society today in that I’m hoping that the elites in China and Russia use the tossers in Wall Street and the Shity as damp rags.

Cameron and ilk have NEVER been Thatcherite, free-marketeers, capitalists or democrats. Always were Corporatist, dictatorial, elitist and wooden-headed. They are about to reap their own whirlwind. Thatcher saved us from the previous one. Mummy is not there to save you now boys, so you will get what you sewed.

Quite true. ‘The Big Society’ has overtones of a classic Freudian slip — not simply as in “a society only for the big people” but rather something better evoked in all its ghoulish gangsterism by imagining a seedy setting a la Raymond Chandler’s fiction of 1930’s LA, where some tough or other belches out the phrase ” dis heah is da entrance ta da big society, right yeah. Dis door, not dat door. Ain’t you unnahstan English mistah?”

Come on, John. As an adman (ex) you know exactly what the Big Society was, an over-inflated sound bite to lull the sheeple into thinking Cameron had a ‘vision’. Being he was never able to actualise it is all the proof needed.

China is not worried about gold manipulations, other than to buy it cheaper, they are looking to the future where un-backed fiat currencies fail. Their debt problem is not new, as the US city/state bankruptcy is not new. Both have been obvious to anyone looking impartially for at least two years.

As to Cameron’s ‘we are all Thatcherites, now’, is correct in the sense that no one outside of the loony left and the LibDems believes State-run or State-organised manufacturing is a good idea. The myth that Thatcher was politically to the right of Ghengis Khan is just that, a myth. While she may personally have had true conservative ideals her governments were just as much Social Democrat as all the rest post WW2.

The ‘loony left’ – what people in touch with reality call real social democracy – works surprisingly well if left alone. At least for as long as the rentiers are properly taxed to push them into real work instead of their usual financial thuggery, and there’s enough cash and education available for the rest of the population to be its inventive best.

Of course Thatcher was just another corporatist. That’s what ‘free market’ means in the real world.

Anyone who thinks it means anything else, or could ever mean anything else, has bought themselves a bridge and is muttering at the rest of us from under it.

Lady Thatcher was more correctly a ‘Manchester Liberal’. She wasn’t a Conservative in the correct sense. What she did was revolutionary and by doing so broke, as is said, ‘the post-war consensus’. What they mean by that is she repudiated the Socialist settlement, and is why so many people hate her so much.

For those of us remember those days well I have to say that with the perspective of time she was damn right. What on earth was the State doing owning bloody Pickford’s ??? Or why should the State run a third of all the lorries on British roads ? It was, and IS, arrant nonsense.

Can’t agree there, TOH. Social Democracy can only work short term, the inherent flaws are: Ever Bigger Government, Ever Bigger Regulation/Intervention, Ever Bigger Spending, High Tax, Big Welfare. Eventually the unfunded/postponed liabilities come due and it all falls apart. And that goes as much for the claimed exemplars of Social Democracy, Germany and the Nordics, just as much as it goes for us.

One serious flaw with socialism is that it lacks internal means of control. Once people realise that everyone is equal, there is no limiting the amount of resources used to make that so. Giving everyone an equal chance in life is perhaps a better solution, but that is almost impossible to achieve and is too long-term a project for any politician. How did the present cabinet get where they did? Merit? Oh no. And top industrialists, with a couple of exceptions? Not likely. Given our truly awful, class-ridden education system, few people can make it from the council ghetto to the highly paid jobs in our society. But that’s what a socialist society needs.

A lot of interesting observations about the complete dominance of money in any form of discourse; public, commercial, private, media, social media and the mess created in just about every country you can think of or name.
The mess and the arbitrary theft at every level by elites and the already wealth is evident in just about every country on the planet.

Seems we are revisiting the crash of the Mayans in the Yucatan many many centuries ago. There the adherence to a flawed religo-political system, no end of human sacrifices or other impleadings to priests prevented the mother of all droughts, fifty years, to decimate their living space and livelihoods, no amount of technology and labour saved them from the disappearance of a key critical essential for life – water.

Despite all the machinery, electricity and profiligate use of every herb, animal and mineral on the plant, as John succinctly describes in his profligate intelligent output here, it seems to be not much different now. Misery beget upon misery as the comforts of life are withdrawn by a collapsed and ready to implode world economic and resource extraction model. So here we are, a critical resource scarcity signal (how much you had to hand over to have some or a smaller sum, triggered a wash out of peoples money everywhere at a time when the creation of capital, shifted entirely to a paper-electronic mirage of based on fiat alone. So when Dora and Bob in their home in somewhere USA, Spain, Greece, France etc etc, found the gas bill and food bill and other knick knackeries of obese consumption patterns bills was greater than income, Mr McCawbers paradigm stepped in. Our religion has been the bizarre and flawed weltaschung of economics and ignorant 18 and 19th centuries views of the world and its many relations. Neo-conservatism together with Friedmanism and the Randian cult followers are the root of our ideological and heuristical failure that and the fantasy of ever never ending fractionally created money,without a physical asett behind it was but that, a fantasy. The rest as you correctly describe has been looting and theft on a grand scale, Clinton opened the gates and the Texans drove right in.

What a marvellous coup of the anti thatch brigade to engineer a BMW hearse to move her body from St. Paul’s to Chelsea. Being ambivalent about her I think she was naïve in thinking bankers could perform with integrity in an unregulated world. Unlike the incumbent and snapping BoJo They know exactly what is happening and need to maintain the charade long enough to massively profit from revolving doors… just like Tony The Terrible.

The thing you need to realise about UK Prime Ministers, Mr Ward, is that they are chosen by unelected and unaccountable oligarchs, then shamelessly plugged through our tame, sycophantic media to a nation of well-meaning people who think that because we have ‘democracy’ that we get to choose our leaders.

The sooner we have a law outlawing media titles and TV stations being owned by those who pay less than 20% of annual income in taxes to HMG, the sooner we will choose PMs ourselves.

I have to say i was not aware of The Big Society slogan. In the end, i think it’s same old – same old everywhere. Big Words is the idea…with no essential content or action to back them up.
Big Words, from Small People, addressed to Little People.